Highgate cemetery in North London is like something out of a Victorian gothic novel. It is one of the vastest Victorian cemeteries in the UK and contains the final resting places of over 170,000 people. However, a place which should have existed as a place of remembrance, in fact has a history plagued with ghost stories, occult and … vampires.

In 1839, Highgate cemetery was opened as one of the Great Seven Cemeteries which acted as the response to a city overflowing with dead. London churchyards had run out of consecrated grounds in which to legally and respectfully bury its people and so these large cemeteries were created to reduce this hazard. The first burial to take place in the cemetery was that of Elizabeth Jackson of Little Windmill street, Soho in May 1839. Highgate quickly became a fashionable and admired place to be buried with many rich and famous residents including Karl Marx and the family of Charles Dickens.

More recently Highgate has seen burials of notable figures such as; Douglas Adams (the author of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) and Alexander Litvinenko; the Russian secret serviceman who was given nuclear poison by Putin’s regime. So great was the radiation level that Litvinenko endured, that his body is buried in a lead lined casket and much deeper than the average grave.

Beyond the stony facades and docile statues of the dead there are other stories, though, which may not at first meet the eye.

The Ghostly Residents of Highgate

Highgate cemetery is a delicious backdrop for a ghost story and has been the sight for a tale or two in its time. Some of the most well known ghost stories from this area include; that of a ghostly cyclist, slowly making his way up a steep hill just outside the cemetery walls and a fearsome poltergeist, which knocks people clean off their feet and appears to glide through solid objects.

Today spectral sightings are reduced to mainly two ghosts, however they are quite consistently reported. The first is that of a mad old woman, whose hair flies behind her wildly as she searches the graves for her children, who many assume she had killed in a fit of insane rage. The other ghost is that of a hooded figure who stares thoughtfully into space, apparently oblivious to any observers. However, when approached this figure disappears and sometimes quickly reappears further away, adopting the same contemplative pose.

Occult at Highgate

By the 1960s, Highgate cemetery was very much a dilapidated place. Very few new burials were taking place there, the tombs were becoming overgrown and there were infrequent visitors to the site. With this lack of care, came a new crowd looking for thrill seeking and new age mischief. Young people interested in occult began to gather at Highgate and break in at night. They would vandalise the tombs; desecrating, looting and leaving satanic or obscure graffiti after them.

Although these behaviours seem like those of anarchists more than a cult sect, there were some strange clues which pointed towards dark black magic practices. The most shocking of which, included the discovery of the charred and dismembered remains of a woman’s body on Lammas, the Pagan harvest festival day.

In addition to the murders, much of the ghost stories from Highgate cemetery had arisen at this time and so more curious folk began to haunt the cemetery in the hopes of a scare. The presence of these young people is important though, in our next topic of the Highgate vampire…

The Highgate Vampire

Highgate cemetery had had an unfortunate past of ritualistic desecration and murder, but everything was about to take a more supernatural turn. On Halloween night 1968, a grave was found dug up and the body had a large metal stake driven through it. The perpetrator had arranged flowers so that they pointed towards the act, as though it wasn’t obvious enough. This wouldn’t be the last of a succession of vampire-related crimes in London cemeteries.

In December 1969, a young man named David Farrant spent the night at Highgate cemetery. He reported sighting a grey figure amongst the graves, which he believed to be supernatural, and began asking others if they had seen anything similar. Farrant believed that what he had saw was most likely a ghost.

At the same time, another young man named Sean Manchester had also sighted an otherworldly entity in the cemetery. Sean had also found numerous fox corpses, drained of their blood, with apparent bite marks. For this reason, he began to spread word that there was a vampire of Highgate! Although he did embellish the story further; claiming that he had discovered that the “vampire” was a medieval nobleman from eastern Europe who had experimented with black magic. Both Farrant and Manchester aggressively denied the other’s credibility.

Sean Manchester

In 1970, finally the feud between Farrant and Manchester came to a head when ITV interviewed them on national television. Within a matter of days, an angry vampire hunting mob stormed the locked gates of highgate cemetery looking to kill the monster which the young men described. They came back out empty handed, though only a few months later another murder took place …

Farrant and Manchester’s activities increased as they both sought to catch and exorcise the vampire. Farrant was discovered by police in the churchyard one night carrying a crucifix and a stake and was arrested, but not charged. When the happenings in the cemetery came to an end, both men claimed to have performed the successful exorcism on the monster and their feud still exists to this day… It seems as though no one will ever know the truth of what each of the men actually saw when at the cemetery by night.